Tag Archives: Alain Lascoux

This is a little “flashback” intermission in my posts about my debate with Aram Harrow. This time I try to refer to Cris Moore’s question regarding the motivation for my study. For the readers it givesan opportunity to win a $50 prize!

(Cris Moore, the debate’s very first comment!) I am also a little confused by Gil’s motivation for his conjectures. (My response:) To the best of my memory, my main motivation for skeptically studying quantum fault-tolerance was that I thought that this is a direction worth pursuing and that I had a shot at it.

While listening with Ravi Kannan to this 2002 lecture by Michel Devoret at Yale, I wondered if there are enough scientists working on the “mirage” side.

Flashback: Mittag-Leffler 2005

I started systematically thinking about quantum fault-tolerance in February 2005. There were several things that triggered my interest to the question in the previous fall and I decided to spend some time learning and thinking about it in our winter break. One of those triggers was something Dorit Aharonov told me a few months earlier: she said that once, when she was telling her students about quantum computers, she suddenly had a feeling that maybe it was all just nonsense. Another trigger came from a former student who told me about a Polish scientist (whose name he could not remember) who wrote an article about impossibility of quantum error-correction. I thought that the lack of a quantum analog of the repetition code, and the unique properties of the majority function in terms of sensitivity to noise that I studied with Itai Benjamini and Oded Schramm earlier could be a good starting point for looking skeptically at quantum computers.

In our 2005 winter break, I spent two weeks at Yale and then additional two weeks at the Mittag-Leffler institute near Stockholm. At Yale, I only had little time to think about quantum computers. I had to finish a survey article with Muli Safra about threshold phenomena (To a volume that Cris Moore and Allon Perkus were among the editors). One of the last days in Yale we went to dinner with two guests, Chris Skinner who gave the colloquium talk, and Andrei Okounkov who visited me and gave a talk about partition enumeration and mirror symmetry. At the dinner Andrew Casson asked, out of the blue, if we think that quantum computers can be built and it almost seemed as if that Andrew was reading my mind on what I plan to work on the weeks to come. My answer there was the same as my answer now, that I tend to find it implausible.

Mittag-Leffler Institute February 2005 with Xavier Viennot and Alain Lascoux

In Sweden I spent most of my time on quantum fault-tolerance. I was jet-lagged and being jet-lagged in the Mittag-Leffler institute already worked for me once, when finding my subexponential randomized variant of the simplex algorithm was a substitute for sleeping some night in fall 1991 . In 2005 it was not as bad, I just came to my office very early in the morning and started working. And very early in the morning somebody was already playing the piano.

And who was playing the piano at the institute in the cold Swedish mornings of February 2005? The first reader to guess correctly, and convince me in a comment that she or he knows the answer without revealing it to everybody else will get $50. Continue reading →